Obama made a cameo
appearance on SNL when he was still a presidential
hopeful.Yahoo/SNL

Before he was even president, Barack Obama was calling
the shots. A new updated section from "Live from New York," Tom
Shales and James Miller’sbook and behind-the-scenes
look at the history of "Saturday Night Live," goes into the
political maneuvering, both on-screen and off, that surrounded
the sketch show during the last few presidential elections.

In among some tasty tidbits from an excerpt published by "The Hollywood
Reporter," like Hillary Clinton mysteriously
backing out of a sketch at the last moment and Sarah
Palin calling the show “egotistical” for thinking it had any
sway on the public’s political opinion, is this story about how
Obama, when he was still just a presidential hopeful, killed a
controversial sketch.

Robert Smigel, writer: It wasn’t until my last
season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was
a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and
profiling, an airline-safety video with multilingual narration,
and whenever you heard a different language, they would cut to
people of that nationality. First, typical white Americans,
then a Latino family, then a Japanese family, all being
instructed about seat belts, overhead compartments, etc. Then
it cuts to an Arab man, and the narrator says, in Arabic,
“During the flight, please do not blow up the airplane. The
United States is actually a humanitarian nation that is rooted
in the concept of freedom,” and so on … When the standards
people freaked, Lorne fought them. Standards pushed back hard.
They even got someone at NBC human resources to condemn it.
Lorne said, “I have a plan.” Obama was doing a cameo in the
cold open. Lorne told me he would show my sketch to Obama. “If
Obama thinks it’s OK, they won’t be able to argue it.” I
thought it was a brilliant idea, except why would Obama ever
give this thing his blessing? What if word got out? “Hey,
everybody, that guy over there said it was cool. The one
running for president of the country.” But I loved Lorne for
caring this much and being willing to go that far to get this
thing on TV.

Lorne Michaels: Obama said, “It’s funny, but
no, I don’t think so.”

Obama may not have given his blessing for that sketch, but he
certainly gave his all when it came time to perform. As Michaels
points out in that same excerpt, Hillary Clinton’s last-minute
decision not to appear paved the way for Barack Obama’s popular
cameo on the show. It’s somewhat jarring to see a much fresher
and more relaxed 2007 Obama, but it is worth wondering how much
this appearance had to do with the outcome of his campaign. Or,
to paraphrase Sarah Palin, would that be giving "Saturday Night
Live" too much credit?